Sitemap - 2024 - Harry's Last Stand Newsletter

Today it is concentration camps for asylum seekers looking for sanctuary in Britain. Tomorrow it will be you if you are poor, marginalised or homeless.

If you are poor or working class mental illness will shorten your life by decades.

We have lost so much, including our democracy because capitalism insists that poverty is necessary for wealth creation

"In 1937, I despised the empire, the monarchy and the whole rotten system that held it together."

We are Binge Watching our own apocalypse and didn't notice we have reached the end of the cliff.

The April Rain when another war was being waged.

We live in a new Gilded Age, and we are on the outside looking in.

If we don't rein in Capitalism by reconstructing a functioning Welfare State- drudgery is the fate for most people.

State Assisted Suicide for the terminally ill in neoliberal economies is another box tick for dystopia, if we don't fix poverty first.

Socialism in a neoliberal world is a day in the life of Sisyphus.

If you vote Labour or Tory during the next General Election, you are the turkey voting for Christmas.

Democracy isn't on the ropes it's down for the count.

The rich are mortal, but their time spent between living and dying isn't the same as our brief dance to the music of time.

In 1936 the working classes knew a war against fascism was only a matter of time. In 2024, we should understand this too for our times.

The 1% have kept us in check with abject poverty, debt poverty, wage poverty, housing poverty, and education poverty, Centrist Governments don't change that.

21 Years after "Shock & Awe," The chickens have come home to roost and the West has become if not a failed state a failed idea.

March 17, 2020, when normal stopped working.

"The working class neighbourhoods of my youth were designed to stifle hope & erase beauty from the lives of the inhabitants. Socialism changed that."

Pick A Lane Because Otherwise An Eternal Season of Totalitarianism Awaits Us.

"In 1935, the books I read at my local library made me aware- poverty wasn't the natural order of things, but instead a perverse and cruel means to control & subjugate ordinary humanity."

Whether it was the 1930s or today, capitalism has always been about making workers beasts of burden for the benefit of the rich.

Growing up in Nazi Germany ensured my mother's post-war feminism was political and left-wing.

If the Working Classes built a Welfare State in the past, we can do it again. But to do it we must destroy neoliberal politics.

History teaches us-Humanity can only live for so long in chains before it rises up in revolution.

"My family mouldered on capitalism's fallow fields of industry during another cost of living crisis that we called the Great Depression."

In 2024 we stepped through the looking glass into fascism. Only emulating how The Greatest Generation built democracies for the many and not the few will save us from annihilation.

Consumerism keeps us diverted, while the corporate news media, the 1% sheepdog, herds us towards fearing the most vulnerable rather than the rich.

The Journey not the arrival matters-the 101st birthday of rebel and socialist, Harry Leslie Smith.

"Democracy doesn't die in Darkness but in the full light of capitalism." Harry Leslie Smith February 25, 1923-November 28, 2018.

It's probably toothache but because of financial reasons I postponed my CT scan for cancer reoccurrence, I fear it has returned.

In 2024, if you are a senior citizen you should rage against the dying of the light for the young rather than the old.

"In the 1930s, my Mum sold her body to pay the rent, to ensure her kids weren't homeless." Capitalism will never be the friend or ally of the working class. Harry Leslie Smith

Childhood was a luxury for the middle classes until the birth of the Welfare State.

There are greater odds for revolution to befall the USA than Russia at the moment.

Neoliberalism in 2024 like Capitalism in 1934 is a system winded from its exploitation of ordinary people. It will break, if we force it.

Anxiety is poverty's co-pilot.

Saturday night and Sunday morning. Harry Leslie Smith on witnessing habitual violence against his mother by an intimate partner.

We are firmly on the road to, if not species extinction, societal annihilation. But mainstream politics wants you to believe the existential threat is higher taxes.

Child Labour in 2024 is as it ever was an exploitation of working-class kids. It is the same capitalism & politics normalising it today that did so in 1932.

Living and Dying in a Rooming house is now a 21st Century thing, the way it once was a Great Depression thing.

2024 will be as desperate as 1932 for those crushed between the jaws of a worsening cost of living crisis & governments beholden to the 1%.

The Wests response to Gaza, put to the sword any pretence that we are a civilised race of creatures.

Covid is the plague that just won't leave, so we can get on with living our best superficial lives.

The Bedbugs of Halifax-The Green & Pleasant Land-Harry Leslie Smith

Whether you want it or not, revolution is coming- most likely of an authoritarian nature. The worst hasn't even happened yet.

"I remember the screams from the dying, in 1931, who were too poor to afford a doctor because there was no public healthcare." Tales from the Green & Pleasant Land.

Britain, Europe, Canada and the USA's war on refugees is a politics Hitler would approve of.

Underpaid and over-leveraged by debt, ordinary citizens may as well be racing dogs chasing mechanical rabbits at the track, and the 1% at Davos are betting on our obedience.

Like 30 years ago, Cuba in 2024 smells of the sea, tobacco and famine thanks to the USA's Embargo.

Covid 19 is the plague that now defines our epoch.

By this time next year- darkness at noon will have come regardless of who becomes US President.

The Green & Pleasant Land in the Year 1931-What was old is new again.

Maybe it won't amount to a hill of beans. But at least future generations will say "They tried."